Hardware rasterization pipelines have been highly successful at rendering complex scenes. However, they generally have difficulty reproducing some physical camera effects, such as defocus blur, motion blur, etc. Unfortunately, current implementations of graphics renderers produce unbiased but noisy images of scenes that include the advanced camera effects of motion and defocus blur and possibly other effects such as transparency. Similarly, ray tracing programs and cameras also oftentimes generate noisy images having motion/defocus blur, transparency, etc.
Just by way of example, recent progress has been made in using stochastic techniques for interactive rendering, including producing the aforementioned camera effects by randomly varying center of projection and/or time per sample, as in typical offline rendering systems. Unfortunately, at interactive frame rates, the number of random samples available in the foreseeable future is not sufficient to produce visually smooth images using simple unbiased sample averaging. There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.